I have observed this weird phenomenon across both my professional and personal lives. In fact, it keeps surfacing every year or so, and therefore, I am compelled to blog about it today. Here’s how I would describe it:
At every important turning point in my life, where I desperately need a few (what I would consider) extremely close relationships to step up for me, almost all of them have failed to show up.
But at the same time, a few connections, whom I don’t have any significant shared history with and wouldn’t consider “close” by any stretch, end up stepping in and backing me at these key moments.
It has happened so many times now that I feel this is some random rule of nature that should have a name. Here are some personal examples:
- When I moved to the Bay Area in 2014, having never studied in the US, with no job in hand, and with literally 2 bags, the person who gave me what turned out to be one of the most significant breaks in my career was…the then-husband of my wife’s ex-colleague.
- One of my most important backers, who was an extremely small angel in my startup but ended up becoming a key influencer in both my decision to come back into venture as well as a major tangible supporter in many ways since then, is the husband of the 1st cousin of one of my past venture collaborators (interestingly, I lost touch with the original person who connected us many years back).
- While we as a family were going through challenges on multiple fronts during the pandemic years and hit several low points, the people who saved us were not our oldest friends but a family we met through our older son’s first daycare.
- The person who ended up giving what turned out to be an incredibly strong referral to my wife at Google more than 8 years back was someone I had overlapped with at a startup for barely 3 months and had no direct work history with.
I have many other examples that are unfolding as we speak, and which I hope to add to this list after a few years.
I don’t know if you have experienced something similar in your lives, but I have been thinking hard for at least a year now about why this happens repeatedly. Here are a few underlying things that I have noticed:
1/ Familiarity bias – when people have been too close to you over an extended period, they see all sides, moods, emotions, and fallacies in your personality. Because of this, I feel they end up subconsciously discounting your skills on many occasions.
I see this play out in venture all the time. Existing investors usually see the sausage being made, and therefore, are often more pessimistic on a portfolio company’s prospects compared to new investors evaluating the same opportunity.
For those who understand Hindi, there is a grandma’s saying on this phenomenon – “घर की मुर्गी दाल बराबर”.
2/ Expectations bias – humans have a tendency to keep very high expectations of people they consider close, especially if they are family or have been known for a long time. So whatever these relationships do at the crunch moments, it’s perhaps impossible for them to live up to the high bar they are being held to.
3/ Timing – the quality & extent of human collaboration depends a lot on timing. Where are each of the subjects in their own life arcs? What is their mind space looking like then? What is the macro environment in which the collaboration is playing out?
In almost all situations, humans are essentially acting in their own self-interest first. So, while to the “receiver” (me in the initial examples), it ends up being a game-changing intervention, the act is also delivering a major utility for the “giver”.
A parallel idea is seen in a key principle of marketing strategy – the job is not to convince uninterested prospects, but to be in the consideration set of leads when they are actively looking to buy a product. Sounds like a simple idea from a b-school course or Kotler’s book, but I have only learned its power at this stage of my career.
Translating this to the core idea of this post, best collaborations happen when both givers and receivers are in the market, and are a great fit for each other’s needs at that specific point in time. This has nothing to do with how close the people have been previously.
Given that I have now observed this core phenomenon, I am trying to do a few small things differently so that I can be on the right side of this rule of nature more often and with a much lower emotional toll. These include:
- Instead of meeting the same set of people all the time, strive to continuously meet new folks and add them to an ever-growing funnel of relationships.
- Be present and show up strongly even in first meetings with new people.
- Following my guru Charlie Munger’s age-old advice, have lower expectations of close relationships and replace that emotion with gratitude that they choose to include me in their lives.
- For major turning points every couple of years, instead of just repeatedly putting “asks” in front of the same set of people, cast a wider net out into the universe using a combination of cold outreach and warm intros.
Anyway, I know this post is a bit all over the place. In fact, I was struggling to even think of a title for it. But these ideas are from my lived experience, and are important enough to be put in front of you.
